Twitter Sends A Eulogy to 3rd Party Apps

I’ve always heard, “never build your business on something you don’t control” and those words have never been more accurate for 3rd party Twitter apps. Of course, this is nothing new as Twitter has crapped on developers a few times in the past and now they are continuing that trend by removing API that my Twitter client of choice, Tweetbot, relied upon.

Rob Johnson, head of product at Twitter, shared some of the reasoning in a thread and then ended asking this:

We’ve heard feedback (#breakingmytwitter) from our customers about the pain this causes. We’re committed to understanding why people hire 3rd party clients over our own apps, and we’re going to do better with communicating changes

I want my feed in chronological order, I want to use a desktop app (not the browser), I want my likes to be my likes, I want to utilize lists and searches.

I think what really gets to me is the head of product has a total of 5,000 tweets and follows close to 700 people. Just following that many means he has a whole different perspective on the platform than most of my friends that follow less than 200. I’ve noticed when I followed around 150 I could keep up with everything throughout the day, but now that I’ve doubled that number it’s just not possible.

At the end of the day, Tweetbot gives me a better Twitter experience than Twitter itself has ever been able to. I have to assume they are happy strangeling the competition to force everyone to either adapt to their ideas or leave the service.

Maybe it’s a great time to revisit Deep Work and quit Twitter altogether and revive that old blog you have laying around?